Tag Archives: t-mobile's gramifone

An analyst has come to the conclusion that T-Mobile’s Garminfone has not been doing well at all due to its low sales. This could be because the people don’t want to have to do anything with a device which is a more or less limited GPS-oriented handset, even though the device runs Android.

The Garminfone is average, with a capacitive 3.5-inch touch screen, a camera of 3 megapixels, 3G, Wi-Fi and a microSD slot. Though these features are not enough to win over customers, and it does not help at all, when you come to know that the Garminfone has no flash with its camera. The only thing Garmin was banking heavily on, was its turn-by-turn navigation and maps, which could have made the appeal to people to ditch their personal navigation devices.

Morgan Keegan analyst Yair Reiner, surveyed close to 50 stores of T-Mobile, and the figures he came across were not in the least satisfactory. It is true that there have been no official announcements regarding Garmin sales, but Reiner’s conclusions can be deemed like a brick. Many sales associates spoke highly of it and claimed that it had the best navigation functionality of any cell phone even before it was released. But days after the release, it has not generated interest from the stores, which hampered sales and others had not sold any despite displays being setup and several sold a few. The sales have been extremely low.

There are many causes attributed to the woefully low sales of the Garminfone; as the Android 2.2, with a free turn-by-turn navigation with the Google Navigation systems, has a major role to play in this. The best way for Garmin to perk up sales is to come up with some killer hardware designs. There are many devices which provide GPS services, the same as the Garmin, and the Garmin needs to come up with something that will give it an edge over the others.